Nicholas Dawidoff

Pete Carroll, the Seahawks coach, was a yard away from winning the Super Bowl. There were less than thirty seconds left to play, and he had the two-legged vortex Marshawn Lynch in his backfield. Yet, instead of remaining grounded, Carroll chose to throw. The Patriots rookie defensive back Malcolm Butler, not long ago employed at Popeyes, recognized the pass route from his opposition film studies. He veered in front of Seahawks receiver Ricardo Lockette to intercept the quarterback Russell Wilson’s pass. The Patriots won, 28-24. For Pete’s sake, coach, you over-think it now?

On Saturday, Bill Belichick, the enigmatic coach of the New England Patriots, decided to be as revealing as perhaps he’s ever been in public. He held what he called “an impromptu thing,” a lengthy, somewhat Dada press conference on the subject of the ongoing mystery that has thus far dominated the dreaded two-week longueur between the league championship games and the Super Bowl—The Big Seep. Unless you’ve been living far off the gridiron, you know that eleven of the twelve balls used by the Patriots offense during the first half of last Sunday’s victory over the Indianapolis Colts were found to be under-inflated two pounds beneath minimum league specifications. This created a more pliable spheroid that might have allowed suppler handling by Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and his receivers.

El Morocco, New York, 1955. From the estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Credit View full screen

Paul Graham discovered photography as an English college student in the nineteen-seventies, while studying microbiology at the University of Bristol. One afternoon, at the library, he came upon a bookshelf with American photography books by Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander. A couple years later, he walked into a bookshop and found a catalogue for Garry Winogrand’s “Public Relations.” Graham was impressed by Winogrand’s portraits of Manhattan in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, but he also thought, “Maybe I could do this.”

“I’m not a Winogrand expert,” Graham said the other day, outside the Winogrand retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A slightly built man, with unspringy black curls and a youthful mien, Graham was wearing a plaid shirt, gray-blue sneakers, and a pair of Clark Kent glasses. “I don’t know how many wives he had. I’m just a fan. But I’m not a blind fan.” Graham, who won the prestigious Hasselblad Award in 2012, said that he took inspiration for “A Shimmer of Possibility,” his own study of American life, from Winogrand’s koan-like belief that “there is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.”

Football is America’s favorite sport, the Super Bowl is the country’s most popular event, and a large part of the appeal of both is gambling. Week to week, more seasoned gamblers (“sharps” or “wise guys”) bet on football than any other sport, and when it comes to the Super Bowl even the amateurs (“squares” or “fish,” to the sharps) who don’t usually gamble put down something on the game. It’s a tradition, like the March Madness office pool. In Las Vegas last year, ninety-nine million dollars were wagered (legally) on the Super Bowl. This year, the layout is expected to surpass a hundred million, and that’s a meagre percentage of what is bet illegally. Jay Kornegay, a bookmaker who is the race and sports director at the Las Vegas Hotel Casino Superbook, guesses that the Nevada action represents only 1.5 per cent of all Super Bowl plays in the country.

“This is a horrible week,” Scott Ferrall said, on Tuesday morning. “I always advise my audience to take the wife out to dinner this week. This is the week nobody cares about. We have to be more creative with what we talk about.”

Ferrall, who is forty-eight, is a veteran late-night sports talk-radio host, and the seven-day nadir he’s referring to is the Super Bowl bye week, the long, barren stretch of football whiteout that precedes next week’s championship game. (There is the Pro Bowl, on Sunday, but Ferrall says football’s all-star competition is “a lame and meaningless disaster. I don’t know anyone who watches.”)

For some football followers, the best part of the game is the anticipation—that “high and delicious anxiety,” as Frederick Exley called the buildup, in “A Fan’s Notes.” But Ferrall’s thirty years in the business have led him to believe otherwise. “People like action,” he said. “Action is what they live for. They want to be jumping up and down, flipping out, all joyous and happy. They don’t want to be making sandwiches and playing with their kids.”

The modern quarterback must be cunning. The position requires a player who can forsake the deliberative comforts of the huddle to stand above center, scan the opposing defensive formation, and, like Napoleon, whose theory of battle was on s’engage, et puis on voit (you enter the fray, and then you see what to do), make rapid play-calling decisions. Omaha. Hut. Snap. Touchdown passes are fine, but in today’s game the desideratum is a quarterback who possesses the accuracy to minimize turnovers, and the presence of mind to avoid being sacked. Meanwhile, in response to the public dismay over long-term effects of football-related concussions, the league has swathed the quarterback in a crinoline of new rules of the game, which make it more difficult for pass rushers to legally hit him—advantages that further enhance the aristocratic primacy of the position. It is the most important role in American team sports.

Not long ago, I was talking about daily life in the N.F.L. with Ryan Fitzpatrick, the veteran Tennessee Titans quarterback, who studied economics at Harvard. “It’s such a physical game,” he said. “You see three-hundred-pounders hitting each other, and people think of the physicality. When people see the game, they think we’re meatheads; they think of the way jocks acted in high school. But we spend more time studying than we do on the field.”

During the period of more than a year that I spent with the New York Jets coaching staff while writing a book, I came to understand what Fitzpatrick was talking about. Football is a grand spectacle—never more so than in the playoffs, which begin this weekend—and it depends on layers of sophisticated tactics that are not immediately apparent. Winning certainly requires imposing your athletic will on an opponent; that part of the game is easy to see. Yet victories also redound to players who can outthink their adversaries. Because there are so few football games in a season, football players generally don’t learn about members of other teams by playing against them, the way baseball and basketball players do. Until they face another team—and, in a given year, they won’t see most of those outside their own division—N.F.L. players are unlikely even to be able to name most of its members. Football players must master the opposition conceptually. In addition to the raw speed and strength that professional football requires, the game involves more mental preparation than any other team sport.

Football and politics are this country’s most popular public spectacles, and the similarities between the two garish sports are sufficient in number to make for a decent parlor game: the season is to the campaign as the playbook is to the, well, playbook. Draft rooms, war rooms, press conferences where nobody says anything of substance (much less what they really think); it’s all of a piece. In both, the actual contests are few, meaningful public information is sparse, and, as a consequence, their enduring popularity has less to do with any resolution than our fevered speculations along the way. That most of us have no real idea of how either game works interferes not at all with our certainties about them. That’s because the real appeal of both is visceral and personal. Emotion is a crucial part of life, and the vicissitudes of the ambitious, precarious people who populate these high-stakes public worlds provide the rest of us, nestled all snug in our opinions, a daily dose of vicarious exultation and despair.

Is there an activity that Americans give more of their attention to and know less about than professional football? The essence of N.F.L. life is the intense weeklong process of preparation for Sunday, which takes place at the thirty-two N.F.L. team “facilities.” The New York Jets allowed me to spend more than a year with them at their team facility in Florham Park, New Jersey, while I wrote a book, but that was unusual. Most visitors to N.F.L. facilities receive only supervised tours on the order of state visits to Pyongyang. In an era of exposure, the national passion operates in almost total seclusion, apart from the televised games. Perhaps the distance gives it an allure that increases the pleasure. Or, possibly, those who watch wouldn’t like what they’d see if they got too close.

As you’ve likely heard by now, a veteran Miami Dolphins guard named Richie Incognito was recently suspended after the man who had played alongside him on the offensive line, second-year tackle Jonathan Martin, left the team and went home to California in distress. Martin (black) is a Stanford-educated classics major. Incognito (white) is a well-travelled frigate of a man who has found hot water in his every football port. Last year, during a Dolphins charity golf tournament, an apparently drunken Incognito approached a woman on the course, fondled her with a golf club, rubbed himself against her, and emptied a water bottle on her head while chanting, “Let it rain.” Within pro football, Martin’s profile makes him a rara avis. At the Dolphins facility, Incognito was the team leader charged with making certain that this rare bird, whom he called “Big Weirdo,” was prepared for N.F.L. life. Incognito left a voicemail informing Martin that he was a “half-nigger piece of shit,” and concluding, “I’ll kill you.”